Poke cake meets pound cake in this must-make spring dessert. A perfectly moist, dense vanilla pound cake (with a delightful hint of almond) is filled with a fresh strawberry filling—adding to the cake's tender crumb and providing the perfect fruity sweet-tart flavor balance. Finish the whole thing off with an eye-catching fresh strawberry glaze, and you have a supremely awesome cake on your hands. Be warned, if you share this pound cake with friends, you'll need to be ready to share the recipe as well.

Inspiration strengthens commitment, of course, but when it’s rooted in a respected brand purpose, all employees will be motivated by the same mission. This enhances collaboration and, as more and more employees come into contact with customers, also helps ensure consistent customer experiences. The payoff is that everyone in the company becomes a de facto member of the marketing team.

This delightfully floral pound cake is a super fun and elegant twist on the classic 7-Up pound cake—not to mention, a most delicious introduction to elderflower if you’re not familiar with its flavor. Easy to whip up and incredibly impressive, this elderflower dessert is a fantastic option for your next dinner party. The floral notes from the elderflower liqueur and tonic water, as well as the lemony tart glaze, perfectly balance the pound cake’s richness. You can find elderflower tonic water at grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Fresh Market, but you can also order it online if you have trouble tracking it down locally. You will have leftover tonic—but don’t worry, that’s just a perfect excuse to make yourself an elderflower gin and tonic to enjoy while your cake bakes. While the flower flavor in this fabulous cake certainly shines, it isn’t at all overbearing.

At a minimum the marketing staff needs expertise in traditional marketing and communications functions—market research, competitive intelligence, media planning, and so forth. But we’ve seen that sometimes even those basic capabilities are lacking. Courses to onboard new staff and teach targeted skills are just the price of entry. The best marketing organizations, including those at Coca-Cola, Unilever, and the Japanese beauty company Shiseido, have invested in dedicated internal marketing academies to create a single marketing language and way of doing marketing.

The first stage is called the "ideation stage," where the idea for the product or service is conceived. Before products go to the market, companies must decide what styles, sizes, flavors, and scents they should sell and the packaging designs they should use. Then, marketing departments usually test new product concepts with focus groups and surveys to ascertain interest levels among potential buyers and refine certain elements.
By a wide margin, respondents in overperforming companies agreed with the statements “Local marketing understands the global strategy” and “Global marketing understands the local marketing reality.” Winning companies were more likely to measure brands’ success against key performance indicators such as revenue growth and profit and to tie incentives at the local level directly to those KPIs. Ironically, almost all companies were meticulous in planning and executing consumer communication campaigns but failed to devote the same care to internal communications about strategy. That’s a dangerous oversight.
A broad array of skills and organizational tiers and functions are represented within each category. CMOs and other marketing executives such as chief experience officers and global brand managers increasingly operate as the orchestrators, assembling cross-functional teams from these three classes of talent to tackle initiatives. Orchestrators brief the teams, ensure that they have the capabilities and resources they need, and oversee performance tracking. To populate a team, the orchestrator and team leader draw from marketing and other functions as well as from outside agencies and consulting firms, balancing the mix of think, do, and feel capabilities in accordance with the team’s mission. (See the interactive exhibit “The Orchestrator Model.”)
Price is also tested through focus groups and surveys. Companies must know the optimal price to sell their products to achieve maximum return. One way to determine price is to set it at a level comparable to competitors, as long the company can recover all associated product expenses and still make a profit. If the company is introducing a product that has never existed, they must determine how much the consumer is willing to pay for it.

Top brands excel at delivering all three manifestations of brand purpose—functional benefits, or the job the customer buys the brand to do (think of the pick-me-up Starbucks coffee provides); emotional benefits, or how it satisfies a customer’s emotional needs (drinking coffee is a social occasion); and societal benefits, such as sustainability (when coffee is sourced through fair trade). Consider the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which defines a set of guiding principles for sustainable growth that emphasize improving health, reducing environmental impact, and enhancing livelihoods. The plan lies at the heart of all Unilever’s brand strategies, as well as its employee and operational strategies.

As a mnemonic for 'product', 'price', 'place' and 'promotion', the four Ps are often referred to as the marketing mix or the marketing program,[33] represent the basic tools which marketers can use to bring their products or services to market. They are the foundation of managerial marketing and the marketing plan typically devotes a section to each of these Ps.

The Quantico actress and singer, who celebrated their nuptials with both a Western and a Hindu wedding to honor both of their religions, surprised their guests with a massive, seven-tier dessert following their first ceremony at the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, India on Saturday. The cake’s design was influenced by the art deco style of the palace and featured a “romantic visual of the couple on the crest,” according to Sandeep Khosla and Aditya Motwane, respective founder-owners of Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla and Motwane Entertainment & Weddings.

Bakery Nouveau is a feast for the senses. Blocks away, the aroma of fresh baked goods tantalize the nose. Take a bite of anything, and you’ll see why people make special trips to our shops in Burien, West Seattle and Capitol Hill to experience the unforgettable charm of Bakery Nouveau. Get a taste online—then make haste to Bakery Nouveau for a culinary seduction unlike any in Seattle.